The Right’s Raid on Libraries Is So Extreme, Even the Dictionary Is Under Fire

It may have started off as an ordinary fall school day at a high school in the Wentzville School District of Missouri in 2022, but when a police officer entered the school library, the day took an unsettling turn. The school librarian didn’t know why the officer was there until he approached her and explained that he was investigating a complaint — she had been accused of distributing pornography to students.

The librarian listened as the officer told her that certain books in her collection, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Gender Queer: A Memoir, had triggered the accusations he had come to investigate. She was dumbfounded. These books were not pornography as someone had charged; they were award-winning works of literature and personal memoirs that explored themes of identity, gender and social control. Yet here she was, being interrogated by police for simply doing her job.

“It felt surreal,” she later told reporters, declining to be identified for fear of her safety. “I was scared to have a police officer questioning me over books. It didn’t seem real.”

In the Wentzville School District, more than 200 books were banned as part of the wave of censorship sweeping through Missouri and the nation. Tom Bastian, the ACLU’s deputy director of communications, explained to the Columbia Missourian, “It is unconstitutional for Missouri’s lawmakers to threaten teachers and librarians with criminal offenses for observing students’ First Amendment rights.” But despite legal challenges and public outcry, bans have continued to grow around the country, turning school libraries into battlegrounds and pushing educators and librarians into the crosshairs.

In 2023 alone, the American Library Association reported 4,240 unique book titles being targeted for censorship — a 65 percent increase from 2022. Almost half of these attacks in 2023 were aimed at books representing the voices and experiences of LGBTQIA+ and Black, Indigenous and other communities of color.

Florida passed a law making it a third-degree felony for teachers to allow students to access banned books — many of which deal with issues of race, gender or sexuality — carrying with it up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

In Tennessee, a school district banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, which tells the story of the Holocaust, while the right-wing parent group Moms for Liberty (MFL) demanded the removal of a book about Martin Luther King Jr.

In Pennsylvania, Brand New School, Brave New Ruby and The Story of Ruby Bridges — which tells the story of a courageous 6-year-old Black girl who was the first to integrate a white Southern elementary school — were also banned. Idaho passed a law that could lead to the prosecution of librarians who check out books deemed harmful to minors.

In a suburban district near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Queer: The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide by Kathy Belge and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson were removed from shelves, and students’ library borrowing records were sent to parents on a weekly basis.

Even the dictionary is now too subversive because it does, after all, contain the words “racism,” “sex” and “transgender.”

In Wyoming, a public library board fired head librarian Terri Lesley in July 2023 after she refused to pull certain titles.

The Escambia school district in Florida even issued a ban “pending investigation” of — wait for it — Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. Even the dictionary is now too subversive because it does, after all, contain the words “racism,” “sex” and “transgender.” The satirical Seattle newspaper the Needling ran the headline “Florida Bans ‘LGBTQ’ from Alphabet” — an absurdity rivaled only by the actual policy of banning the dictionary.

Beyond the books that have been explicitly banned, teachers have also reported the phenomenon of “shadow banning.” In some districts, books quietly disappear from shelves without any formal public process. A teacher from Texas told the Zinn Education Project: “Leaders in the district are quietly pulling books from shelves so that there’s no record of banning. This shadow banning is removing access to books as we increasingly focus on school culture and policy that polices students, forces assimilation, and dehumanizes our children.” Shadow bans not only strip students of their right to access information but do so covertly, without public scrutiny or accountability.

It’s also quite telling which books are not being banned. As the historian Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in the book he recently co-edited, Our History Has Always Been Contraband, “For example, there are no calls to ban Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which asserts frequently that Black people are innately inferior to whites—physically, intellectually, and even in terms of imagination.” The book banners aren’t trying to remove books like Master George’s People: George Washington, His Slaves, and His Revolutionary Transformation that gloss over the brutality of slavery. Instead, the targets of censorship are books that challenge white supremacy and heteronormativity. Books that glorify the framers’ enslavement of Africans or sanitize the U.S.’s violent history remain safely shelved.

The banning of books is not just an attempt to suppress information but also an attempt to maintain inequitable power distributions. Yet, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”

What is it, then, that the U.S. has to be ashamed of today? Structural racism, transphobia, homophobia, the widening wealth gap and the continued exploitation of the most vulnerable, to begin. These are the issues that young people have a right to read about and discuss.

“My school library has been entirely cleared out and locked in a closet,” a 15-year-old student in Ohio told the Books Unbanned campaign for their “In Their Own Words” report. “And the only public libraries nearby are outright removing every piece of LGBT … media [they] possibly can. I just want to read.”

The supreme irony of book banning is that the same right-wing voices bemoaning “cancel culture” are themselves engaging in the most tyrannical form of cancellation — using the power of the state — to censor any books, ideas or stories they disagree with. Consider Donald Trump’s denunciation of canceling when he said, “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it.” And then consider that Trump also led the charge to ban any discussion of race in the government, writing on X, “I BANNED efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies. Today, I’ve expanded that ban to people and companies that do business with our Country, the United States Military, Government Contractors, and Grantees. Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!”

“My school library has been entirely cleared out and locked in a closet,” a 15-year-old student in Ohio told the Books Unbanned campaign.

They’re not just banning free speech and removing books from shelves; they are intimidating educators, threatening librarians and enforcing their will with the force of law.

Thanks to a movement of librarians, educators, students, parents and writers — including an open letter signed by 27 authors and illustrators calling on Missouri school boards and districts to end book bans — the Missouri school district of Wentzville reshelved most of the over 200 books they had banned. And yet, 17 books — including The Handmaid’s Tale – The Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood, Renee Nault (illustrator) and Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (illustrator) — have been permanently banned.

A 16-year-old student from Georgia summed up well the stakes of this struggle:

The freedom to read is the freedom to explore and uncover worlds that were previously unknown. It is the ability to understand the important conversations being discussed around you, and the decisions that are being made on the Congress floor. To have the freedom to read taken away is equivalent to taking away the ability to see, to talk, to listen, to understand, to be compassionate, and to be informed. How can one learn if they are restricted to a certain selection of books?”

The voices of young people, educators and librarians are clear: Censorship erodes our freedom and the ability to question, learn and grow. During this year’s National Banned Books Week (September 22-28) and beyond, let us commit to defending access to anti-racist ideas and stories that lift up LGBTQIA+ people, for without them, we close the book on our history — and with it, our humanity.